Pressing On to What Lies Ahead

The proofreading sweater is now in retirement.  Yesterday was my final yearbook deadline - not just of the year.  It was my last ever yearbook deadline.  In my Thanksgiving post last November, I wrote about 18 years of being the yearbook advisor and why it was time for me to hand it over to someone else.  In that post, I promised to talk about what happens next.  

Let me go back to April of 2022 when I began thinking about this.  Our school has grown dramatically over the past 18 years, and when we got an email about our growing enrollment, I recognized that the methods I have used to make the yearbook all these years were not going to be scalable to this size.  One sleepless night, I had the thought, "In a few years, it may be time to pass this on to someone who can delegate better than I can."  Within a few weeks, I was thinking that perhaps this should happen sooner rather than later.  I wanted to make sure I stopped while I still loved doing it (If that sounds strange, listen to this episode of the TED radio hour in which Daniel Kahneman discusses the Peak End phenomenon of our memories).

But I am not a person who walks away from things easily, and I'm a pretty reflective person (hence this blog).  So, I started thinking about what I have loved about doing the yearbook all these years.  What things do I get from it that I don't want to lose?  There are a number of small things, but there were ultimately two major ones.  

1. Connections with many teachers - Our school is currently on two campuses, with our TK through 6th grade located down the hill about a quarter of a mile from our 7th through 12th grades.  While we have occasional large group meetings, most faculty are not well-connected with those on the other campus.  Because I might pop into a room with my camera at any time and send email requests for photos, I have more knowledge of what is happening in classrooms than most, and it is part of why I love the school so much.
2. Legacy contribution - Teaching is about projecting something into the future.  While we obviously do that with our students, it is important to think about the future of the school itself.  I have been at GRACE for 20 years, and preserving our memories in the yearbook has made me feel that I was making a tangible contribution to the school's legacy.

These were both things that I didn't want to lose, but I was uncertain about how I would maintain those things as I moved forward.  In the midst of all of this musing, I was having an email conversation with our academic dean about doing some presentations on cognitive science with our teachers for professional development.  It was then that the penny dropped, and I realized that this was how I could keep dual campus connections and make a contribution that would carry forward.  

I ran this by a couple of colleagues to see if they thought I was crazy, and they were excited about it.  I carefully crafted an email to my principal with all of these notions, thinking she would be shocked.  Her reply was two sentences - "Sounds great. I'll start working on it."  I ended the year with a pep in my step as I was having new ideas about how to pursue this new role - even though we haven't fully fleshed out what it will be.

This will begin, in part, after spring break.  I will spend six Tuesday afternoons presenting professional development sessions based on the things I learned at a Learning and the Brain conference about the science of learning, and the librarian and I are going to purge and reorganize our professional development books to make the shelf more user-friendly.  Since I won't constantly be heading out to games and events every afternoon, I have joined the Y (I've been going for two weeks now, and I sense blog posts with fitness class analogies in the works).

Next year, I will begin making resource recommendations to my colleagues (and by "begin," I mean "continue" because I've been doing that for years - it will just be official now).  I will teach a study skills elective using the works of Barbara Oakley and Daniel Willingham.  I will observe anyone who will let me and talk through cognitive science-based pedagogy with them.  I hope to make monthly presentations in faculty meetings on a variety of topics, starting with Working Memory and Cognitive Load.  I was also thinking it might be a good idea to send parents some tools to help their kids with studying.  There may be a few other things in the works as well.  If you think that sounds like a lot, I assure you, it won't add up to the amount of work I've been putting into the yearbook.

I will always be grateful for the 18 years I have spent advising the yearbook, but I am happy to press on to what lies ahead, empowering teachers in their decisions with knowledge of research and making kids better learners by showing them how their brains work.

The Men Who Look Over My Shoulder

I don't know how well you can see this, but this is the wall behind my school desk.  I believe it is important to establish credibility, so I hang my college diploma and my certification.  The thing at the bottom was added after the yearbook staff managed to surprise me with the dedication during the lockdown.  The two photos are of the two men who taught me what I now teach.  Mr. Sandberg, who taught me physical science 31 years ago, is the man in the color photo on the right; he is holding a Bible that I gave him as a goodbye gift we both left the school in which he taught me.  The man in the black and white photo was my physics teacher, Mr. Barbara.  (Incidentally, I took both photos, but for the black and white one, I not only took that photo, but I also developed the film and printed it in a darkroom.  I don't know why that matters to me so much, but it does.). Since the real first day of school is Monday, I thought it was a good moment to reflect on the power of these pictures.

These men look over my shoulder as I plan to teach students the same content that they taught me.  I've written about both of these men on this blog before and why they are meaningful in my life, so you can click the links at their names if you wish to read about them.  That isn't what I want to write about today, even though I would be happy to talk about them all day long.

What struck me this week as I pointed to these pictures as part of my orientation speech is the connection education provides to all of us, like a game of Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon.  

Education is a lot of things.  For some narrowly focused people, it is simply job training.  Those are the "When am I ever going to use this in life?" people.  They are the people who don't recognize they use algebra every day.  I'm glad that we can use the things we learn in school in our jobs, but if I thought that was the point, I wouldn't find it very compelling; so I am grateful it is more than that.  Others, including myself, have a view of education that is about knowing God.  As I told my students this week, "Education makes you a fuller human being.  We are made in the image of God, and He has given us all of this to help us know Him better, and learning it helps us to reflect that image more fully."  And, of course, there is a range of thoughts in between these two extremes that are also true of education.  But when I looked at these pictures before leaving on Friday, I thought about the fact that my students are being taught, in part, by these two men, which led me to think of education in a different way than I had before.  It is a connection to both the past and the future.

This isn't a new idea.  I just hadn't thought about it much before this week.  There are many examples of how people pass down knowledge to multiple generations through teaching. 

• Socrates mentored Plato, who passed philosophy on to Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great.  
• Yoda taught Luke Skywalker who then trained Rey.  
• When Newton built on what Galileo had established; he called it "standing on the shoulders of giants" and credited it with his ability to "see farther than other men."  

Some of my students have become teachers, which means that it is possible there is something happening in their classroom because it happened in mine, which is true only because it happened in Mr. Sandberg's or Mr. Barbara's (and many others as well).  And the chain could go farther back and farther forward as they were taught by people before and my students will also have students who teach others.  I don't know if I am adequately conveying how powerful I think this is because I feel like I am rambling, but in my brain, this is really awe-inspiring.  

The world of education has been rocked in recent years.  The pandemic was tough and amplified some of the problems that were already evident.  Public education is experiencing a profound teacher shortage.  We are all exhausted.  But this - this idea that education perpetuates knowledge so we don't have to discover everything in every generation - this has not changed because it cannot.  

Thank you to these men who look over my shoulder.  Thank you to those not pictured who are also part of my teaching.  Thank you to those who taught them.  Thank you to Sal Kahn and Hank Green and others who teach online to provide a horizontal connection as well.  Thank you to all whose teaching has informed my own.  Your influence will carry farther than you or I can ever know.